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cinco de planet alignment
Friday, May 5 2000
There were gallons of tequila and cases of Corona in the kitchen at my workplace today, and at around 5:30 people began fixing themselves drinks. I was in the middle of some especially tricky code rewriting at the time, so (it stands to reason!) I didn't participate. It was the first time I can think of that I ever passed up free booze.
I've been doing an admirable job of staying out of the workplace social scene, hoping to accomplish the dual objectives of simplifying my life and putting off for now the predictable consequences of documenting my workplace and its employees. For now, nothing too interesting is happening. There's the usual free bagel Fridays, bottomless coffee pot and drink machine that requires no change. There's the missed deadlines, the failures of inter-departmental communications, and behind-his-back CEO belittling. But, as a relatively mature business in an enlightened town, the company seems to lack many of the irritations typical of my year and a third at CollegeClub.com. For example, I'm the first in my department to show up every morning (at 8:30am) and I leave at the median going-home time (6pm). I take a lunch every day, as do my managers. There's no company culture of guilt shadowing normal human comforts like pausing to eat food, going home at a regular time to pursue hobbies, etc. There's no one sanctimoniously putting in dozen-hour days (except perhaps for a small cadre of old-timers who seem to be single-handedly running the place). There's no motivational posters and no ra-ra company meetings. I haven't been coerced into applause even once. In fact, I'm more excited about finishing the work I'm doing than the bosses who are telling me to do it.
At home, I spent the evening trying to install my DSL service. The modem finally arrived today, and I thought it would be a simple matter to plug it in and start reaping the benefits of high bandwidth. But it didn't quite happen that way. After everything was plugged in and all the phones had their funky little DSL signal filters, my connection wasn't happening. So I dialed the handy tech support line. "Your call is important to us. Estimated time until you have a technical support representative is nine minutes." I went and poured myself a brandy.
As I was finishing my second brandy (having just re-installed my communication software and rebooted three or four times), the tech guy gave up and forwarded me to "a senior technician." A simple database query determined that GTE hadn't turned on the line yet. If that query had been done two brandies before, I wouldn't be a frazzled drunk. Needless to say, I had no energy left over for any other Friday night activities in my new hometown of Los Angeles.
The conjunction of the sun, moon and various planets in Taurus was supposed to have caused massive astrologic consequences today, but I didn't notice any. Nor did I experience Los Angeles being torn physically in half, as some with excessive faith in the power of remote gravitational attraction had predicted. Others had published books predicting polar melts and flooding. I wonder which are more expensive now, those books or ones concerning Y2K preparedness.
It's all sort of funny to me, but in the tantra/holistic health community to which Kim belongs, such fears were enough to cause the rescheduling of seminars and other weekend events. 'Tis best to be out in the desert if 5-5-00 is the day of the big one.
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